In this episode, Kate Carpenter interviews Dr. Anna O. Law, a political science who retrained herself in historical methods to write her new book, Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship. Anna is a professor of political science and Herbert Kurz Chair in Constitutional Rights at CUNY Brooklyn College. In her new books, she takes a close look at which parts and levels of government in the United States have controlled people’s ability to move around and across borders throughout the country’s history. It’s a history that is especially pertinent now, as we await the Supreme Court’s forthcoming decision about the Trump administration’s attempt to end the right to birthright citizenship protected under the 14th amendment of the constitution.
Anna and Kate talked about what it meant to think like a historian as well as a political scientist. She also divulged her decidedly analog research tools, the feedback she asks colleagues to give on her drafts, and her advice for any writer deciding on a press for publishing a book.
Note: Links to bookshop.org are affiliate links. If you purchase books through these links, not only will you be supporting the author, but you will also help to keep Drafting the Past going. Thank you!
Mentioned in this episode:
- Anna O. Law’s website
- Anna Law, Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship
- Anna Law, The Immigration Battle in American Courts
- Metal page darts
- Sarasa gel pens
- Anna's favorite Clairefontaine notebooks
- Anna Law on BlueSky
- Anna’s blog post about writing the second book
- Episode 102: Gautham Rao
- Megan Kate Nelson, The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier and The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (and my first and second interviews with her)
- Lucy Salyer, Laws Harsh As Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law and Under the Starry Flag: How a Band of Irish Americans Joined the Fenian Revolt and Sparked a Crisis Over Citizenship
Transcript:
Kate Carpenter 0:01
Welcome back to Drafting the Past. This is a podcast about the craft of writing history, and I'm your host, Kate Carpenter. Before I get started with today's episode, a quick favor to ask: if you're a fan of the show, will you leave a review on your favorite podcast app? It helps people to know that this is a show worth checking out, and it really does help.
Kate Carpenter 0:19
Okay, so when I asked listeners for feedback a few months ago, a couple of you mentioned that you'd love to hear from writers in other academic fields who also work on historical topics. If that was you, then today's episode is especially for you. Dr. Anna Law is a political scientist, but for her new book, Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship, she retrained herself in historical methods to write the book she really hoped to write. I'm happy to have Anna on the show today.
Anna Law 0:49
I'm so excited to be here.
Kate Carpenter 0:51
Dr. Anna Law is a professor of political science and the Herbert Kurz Chair in Constitutional Rights at CUNY Brooklyn College. In her new book, she takes a close look at which parts of the US government have controlled people's ability to move around and across borders throughout the country's history. It's a history that's especially pertinent now as we await the Supreme Court's forthcoming decision about the Trump administration's attempt to end the right to birthright citizenship protected under the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. Anna and I talked about what it meant to think like a historian, as well as a political scientist. She also divulged her decidedly analog research tools, the feedback she asked colleagues to give on her drafts, and her advice for any writer deciding on a press for publishing a book. Enjoy my conversation with Dr. Anna Law.
Anna Law 1:42
So I began as writing political science research, and I am still a political scientist, but mid-career I decided, you know, I write more like a historian, and I made the decision early on in the second book to write for a general audience, which, it's-- Marcus Rediker said you need to want to do that, and you need to commit to it and read widely and read people who do that properly. So I started as an academic political scientist writer, and I became a legal and policy history writer mid-career, and with the aim of writing for a broader audience, and part of that grew out of frustration of my own field, where it's just infested with jargon, I mean, not everyone, but a lot of it.
Kate Carpenter 2:40
Let's just talk about the basics. When and where do you like to do your writing?
Anna Law 2:44
I keep the hours of an old lady. I go to sleep really early, and when I was closing out this book project, which took forever, I set my alarm for 5am because I like to write early in the morning, no one is pinging me. It seems like I just have the world to myself, and it's peaceful. So I did that for a year and a half to finish the book, but now that the book is done and I've turned the alarm off, I still wake up between four and 530 so I just start writing.
Kate Carpenter 3:24
Not a bad habit. How do you like to organize yourself?
Anna Law 3:27
You mean every morning or--? Yeah, look, you know, the first essential thing is make the coffee, so my brain is actually somewhat on, and by the end of the second cup of coffee, I feel like I'm at my peak awakeness. What I usually do is write for a couple of hours, and then put a sticky note on my computer, saying, okay, this is where I left off, and now I need to, next session, I need to cover the history of this thing, but if I do that every day, it's, it's easy, but if I'm away for a few days, that's where the sticky note is useful.
Kate Carpenter 4:08
Do you try to write every day?
Anna Law 4:09
I try to write every day. It doesn't always happen. Some days it's not a matter of no time. I mean, yes, the days that I teach, it's more hectic, but there are days where I'm not running off to teach, or you know, other administrative duties, and the brain is, it's not happening, it's not happening. I have long accepted, okay, you know what, I'm not fully in control of my brain. There are days where it's going to flow, and there are days it's not happening. If I can't write, I will go and read something that's related to the project.
Kate Carpenter 4:49
How do you keep track of all your research and your reading notes?
Anna Law 4:52
I am old school, so I know, you know, scholars, my friends, who's like, "Oh, you've gotta use Scrivener." And okay, I have a pile of physical notebooks where if I read something I take notes and I write notes to myself, so it's like a writer's diary where I'm talking to myself, it's an ongoing dialog with myself, here's a, here's two things that I don't know what's the relationship to each other. Figure it out. Those are the kind of notes that I take.
Kate Carpenter 5:28
How do you then, do you just read your notes back to yourself all the time, or how do you translate notes to writing?
Anna Law 5:35
I go through the notes, and so, for example, I read many books, and I took notes while I was reading. I will then go through the notebooks again before I write and use a highlighter and highlight, okay, I need to cite this or I need to make sure I mention this part of the book. And then that's how it goes from me, that's how I process the information that I highlight the yellow, I need to mention this in the text of what I'm writing.
Kate Carpenter 6:05
Do you like to outline, then, to sort of keep track of where you're going?
Anna Law 6:09
I try to outline. My dissertation advisor told me once, he said, "Oh, that's nice." I said, "What do you mean that's nice?" He said, "Oh, I don't outline, I just put words on a page and keep fiddling it with it until it's right," and I can't do that, that, that sounds, that sounds insane. So I do have a rough outline, I don't always follow it, but there's got to be on paper the skeleton of what am I doing, of course it might change it, but the way he writes just terrifies me.
Kate Carpenter 6:45
If I don't have at least a bare bones outline, I could go off on so many rabbit holes.
Anna Law 6:50
Right, I'm going on tangents, and you know, way, veering way off. So he's like, yeah, I just keep rewriting it until I know it's okay, and I, yeah, everyone has their own process. I can't do that.
Kate Carpenter 7:04
What does the revision process look like for you?
Anna Law 7:07
So one of the things that I adopted and learned mid-career and implemented for this second book is use one writing session to write, and what I tell my students, I describe it, and they laugh. I said I vomit write in a session. I'm spewing words onto the page, I'm not stopping to edit, and I don't care if there are topic sentences or if I repeat things, I'm just spewing words onto a page, and in a different writing session, I will only edit. In one session, I'll write, and then another session, I'll edit. And I told my students, I said, you know, you guys keep thinking that, oh, I can't start writing until I figure out what I'm going to write. That's that's not how it is. You, you figure out what you're going to say in the process of writing. I said, and don't you feel better when you're feeling sick, and you've, after you vomit? And they're like, what? I said, when you get words on the page, even if they're messy, then that's when I can help you. If there's nothing on the page, I cannot help you shape nothingness of the page. Put words down. Doesn't have to be pretty, you can make it pretty later.
Kate Carpenter 8:33
What does the making it pretty look like? Do you, I mean, are you printing it out and writing on it? How do you approach that?
Anna Law 8:41
Sometimes I edit on the computer, but most times if it's more than eight pages, I have to print it out and mark it up with pen and pencil, and I oftentimes when I'm vomit writing, topic sentences go missing, and I have to move paragraphs around to make sure the flow and the order, so that's what's going on with pen and paper.
Kate Carpenter 9:08
I want to bug you for some really nitty gritty process details, because I have learned that listeners are nerds, like I am, and love it when they hear specifically what what supplies people are using, and I know that you use some specific supplies for marking up your books and keeping track of reading. Can you tell me more about what you use?
Anna Law 9:30
I have no tips for, you know, these these high-tech resources, because I'm literally old school, and they're these things called metal, they're metal darts that I stick in the books as I'm reading, because those are the passages I want to cite later, right? Especially if it's a library book, I can't be marking the book, I mean, I could, but I'd be an asshole, and like, I know enough librarians that they say, "Thank you for using those," because you know, those, the plastic flags that we all have that are much cheaper. The librarians hate that, because when you take it out, if you're not careful, you're gonna rip the page, right? So, out of respect for the library books, and even for my own books, and I don't want, like, a million flags sticking out of it, the page points, the darts, after I use them, I can reuse them, so I use those to mark. Okay, I have to cite this passage, or I have to cover this concept, and that's the unsexy tools that I use.
Kate Carpenter 10:37
I don't know, I think metal page darts are pretty sexy.
Anna Law 10:40
I think so, but you know, people are like, no, you have, you know, all these other tools like Scrivener, which I'm sure is, to me, whatever gets it done, whatever gets you to the end of the book, however you organize it, get it done. It does. There's not one way to, I choose to do it the old, old-fashioned way.
Kate Carpenter 11:01
Absolutely. Do you have favorite notebooks?
Anna Law 11:04
I have these notebooks called-- some sort of French notebook, where the ink doesn't bleed to the next page if I write in them. So, I have a pile of those, but I have a notebook problem. I keep buying blank notebooks because I like the promise of them, and now I need a 12 step program to wean me off a bit.
Kate Carpenter 11:26
A relatable problem, I think, to have. Do you have favorite pens too?
Anna Law 11:30
This gel pen, a Sarasa, from a Japanese, and so I have a bunch of those. I bought them at Jet Pens, which is a dangerous place. It's a Japanese stationery store. Be careful, don't say I didn't warn you.
Kate Carpenter 11:45
Awesome. I want to talk a little bit more. You, as you mentioned, you're a political, you're a political scientist, but to write this book, you felt like you needed to sort of change tact a little bit and become interdisciplinary and train yourself in historical work, and I understand from following you on social media that it was really important to you to sort of do that right. What did that process of retraining yourself in that way look like?
Anna Law 12:11
The retraining involved tons and tons and tons of reading of historians' monographs, so I understood what was happening in each time period. Since I have no formal training in US history, I wasn't comfortable writing anything until I felt like I had a sense of what was happening in each time period. So, my friend Rachel Sheldon said, you know, for us the past is a foreign country. It really was. So, for an example, the colonial chapter. Oh my god, people, please read my colonial chapter, because it took three years. One chapter took three years. Why did it take three years? Because I did two years of reading just to understand basic information before I was willing to put pen to paper. So, retraining myself as a historian meant I have to read a ton to lay down basic information, whereas a colonial historian would have probably blown through that chapter in a couple of months, not three years.
Kate Carpenter 13:14
Did you feel like historians think differently than political scientists do?
Anna Law 13:19
I don't think they think differently, but I did need to be aware of the conventions of the field, because there are political scientists who are American political development specialists like me who study history, but our focuses are different, so we use history, historical evidence the same way, but I felt like I needed to understand. Okay, what are the conventions of writing history from historians and from legal historians, and what are the conventions for political scientists? What I did know from the very start was there are no different standards for historical accuracy. No one is going to say, "Oh, she doesn't have a PhD in US history, she can be a little bit wrong." That's not happening. So, reading a ton and understanding the conventions of different disciplines.
Kate Carpenter 14:17
How would you say that political scientists approach historical evidence differently?
Anna Law 14:21
They focus on, so historians write about political figures, they write about federalism, like I do. They write about the Supreme Court and the federal courts. The difference I see within our between our two fields is that political scientists focus more on power and they focus especially on institutions like the Supreme Court, for example, as, how does that institution, as comprised of not just bricks and mortars buildings and people, how is that institution, or an institution like federalism, how does it structure and channel political power. So we study the same topics, but we focus on different things. So, the analogy I would give is, so I live in New York City, and if you go to Times Square, it's an insane, like, sensory overload of, you know, there's people, there's jugglers, there's there's naked cowboys, there's all sorts of things going on. A historian and a political scientist can go to Times Square, and you might aim your camera in one direction and capture one thing, and I'll aim my camera in a different direction and capture something else. It's still Times Square, it's what we chose to zero in and focus on.
Kate Carpenter 15:45
That makes sense. I'm interested in, you've described Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship as a synthesis, meaning that you really drew from a lot of other scholarship, but used that to make new insights and bring that together. What were your strategies for sort of balancing what other people had said with your analysis and your conclusions and making that all a coherent piece of writing?
Anna Law 16:10
I think that was one of the big challenges of the project. I would say 60% of the time of the 16 years I spent was reading historians, reading law review articles, federal Indian law, to educate myself on what is happening in these time periods. Once I read all those things, and I had explained to myself what was happening, I then had to explain to readers, right? So I had, after I read all the secondary sources, and in one chapter I used primary sources. Multiple chapters I read federal and state laws in that synthesis. I had to figure out what's the narrative, what's what's the overarching narrative, and then once I figured out what I was going to say, then I plugged in the historical monographs and the law review articles and the laws that I read into my narrative, but it took a long time to figure out what my overall narrative would be.
Kate Carpenter 17:16
Talk me through how you thought about structuring the book, then.
Anna Law 17:19
The structure, so the total, the narrative arc, the time period where it began and where it ended, that was the easy part, because there's a clear demarcation from the colonial period to 1888 where the colonies, and then the states control international and interstate migration, so I had the beginning and end point, that's the easy part, but the in the middle part is I thought, okay, so of this phenomenon where we have local control of international and internal migration, what elements of it do people need to know to understand how this was happening, why it was happening, who was subject to these laws. So then once I figured out the time period, I used each chapter to spotlight an element of local control over migration.
Kate Carpenter 18:21
Did you have an ideal reader in mind while you were writing? How did you think about the audience?
Anna Law 18:27
So, I lied to my commissioning editor. He said, 'Who's your, you know, for, he said who's your primary audience?" I said, 'Oh, those would be political science scholars who are American political development specialists like me.' Okay, that's all of 10 people. Yeah, so early on in the project, I decided my ideal reader is a smart layperson, like my undergrad students. I need to be, I mean, I tried to thread the needle of saying something new and interesting to scholars who are specialists in this area, but to not lose general readers who are smart laypersons, like a New York Times reader, like an NPR listener, like a college student, like the ones sitting in my classroom.
Kate Carpenter 19:19
Did it take work for you to achieve a voice to reach that reader? Did you have to revise for that, or did it come naturally?
Anna Law 19:28
I don't know if it came naturally, but I knew to strip out jargon. Jargon always bothered me, but so I made a concerted effort to not use jargon, and I, you know, as I had friends read chapters, I would tell them, if you see a sentence and you have to read it three times and you still don't know what I'm talking about, you should flag it, because that means I wasn't clear, so I don't know if it came naturally, but I tried, I tried to write accessibly.
Kate Carpenter 20:01
What kinds of people did you turn to for feedback?
Anna Law 20:04
So, because I covered so many time periods I am not familiar with, I thankfully had historian friends who are specialists in those periods. So, for each chapter, the colonial chapter, I had a colonial historian friend read it, and other people who specialize in that area, but when it came to the prospectus, I had grad school friends who are not in my subfield at all, because I need to be clear, and the introduction and the prospectus, if I'm not clear, people stop reading, including the commissioning editor, so it depended on what I was shopping around. I had different people read it.
Kate Carpenter 20:47
I'm curious about-- you also have written quite a few op-eds and opinion essays, which are also very much pitched at a wider readership and very engaging voice. Is the process of writing those different than the way you approach writing a book?
Anna Law 21:02
It is, and because it comes in the stage after the book is out, that's when you're the most tired. When, when that book went out the door, and I turned in the last round of revisions, of, you know, correcting page proofs, my instinct is I never want to see this thing again after 16 years. Sweet Jesus, please don't come back. It's like, you know, it was like I was a happy empty nester, kicking the last kid out, saying, please don't come back. I wish you well, please do not come back. But you have to promote your book, and I had to write op-eds, so the op-eds are much shorter. They are written for a general audience, and they're.. I would characterize them as like an appetizer. It's to make people interested enough that maybe they'll read the book, that maybe they'll buy the book and borrow the book and read more.
Kate Carpenter 21:59
That brings me to another question, because I know that you've mentioned that you don't have a publicist or really a publicity team which is supporting this book, and I think sometimes that surprises people, but it's quite common for authors, of course. How have you approached trying to get the word out about your book?
Anna Law 22:16
In theory, your press is supposed to have a publicity office in actual practice, academic presses, their offices are understaffed and overwhelmed with the number of books they have to promote, and no author, even the ones with like a five figure publicist, ever feel like their book is getting enough attention, you have to do it yourself. I'm only on one social media platform, which is BlueSky, and so I've been relentlessly posting stuff on that about the book, and you got to roll up your sleeves and hustle. Megan Kate Nelson told me this. She said, I don't care if you have a publicist, you still have to pitch podcasts, you have to write op-eds. You cannot just publish a book and say, well, people will just recognize my brilliance and they will read it. They may not even know about it. How are they supposed to know about it? You have to put it in front of them.
Kate Carpenter 23:26
You've mentioned elsewhere the challenges of writing a second book. This was your second book. Can you talk a little bit for people who maybe haven't thought about this or heard you talk about this? What were some of those challenges?
Anna Law 23:39
The second book almost killed me, which is this book, because you're not working from the dissertation anymore. The first book was based on my dissertation, I was working from something. The second book should be something completely new and different from the dissertation, although there might, it may be related, but I don't have a dissertation committee to help me and guide me. And my care duties-- I was, I'm an only child, I was respon-- I am still responsible for elder care of two of my parents, both with dementia, and so I'm, I'm, I have care duties that that I'm juggling, I'm teaching full time. I have service obligations, and so it's all the juggling that you don't have when you're, when you're completing the first book. If you're lucky enough to be on the tenure track, a lot of departments will protect junior faculty from too much service. After that, man, open season, once you get tenure, they're gonna, I mean, all this, you are, your service obligations go up at the same time in your life cycle that your child care duties and your elder care duties may also be there, and so finding time to get that second book done is is a real slog, and it, it is, it's not you, it's structural. It is much harder. That second book is much harder. I talked about it in a blog post on my blog, and wrote and enumerated those challenges, and how you can counter them.
Kate Carpenter 25:18
For you, how did you then-- I mean, yes, absolutely, it is structural, and yet here you are as an individual having to figure out how to write the second book. How did you keep it a priority for yourself? How did you make it happen?
Anna Law 25:32
I think the writing was sort of my way of compartmentalizing and my refuge from the very heavy elder care duties and my other job obligations. This was my time where I could focus on research and writing that was meaningful to me. That is the noble answer. The more realistic answer is sheer pig headed stubbornness and spite. I had sunk so much time into this project. I said, oh no, no, I'm gonna drag myself to the finish line, because I know people are wondering what is she doing. She keeps talking about this book. Where is this book? Is there even a book? So, through sheer spite, I'm like, no, there's a book, I'm gonna finish it.
Kate Carpenter 26:26
Amazing. I want to ask you a funny question, but you are also known on social media for your cooking. You are a spectacular cook, at least you appear to be. I've never been lucky enough to sample your food, but everything I hear is that you're a spectacular cook. I interviewed Gautham Rao recently, and in his acknowledgments he even mentions not only your scholarship but your cooking. What role does a hobby like that play in relationship to your writing? Or does it?
Anna Law 26:53
Cooking is my creative outlet. It is-- what we do as scholars takes so long, right, to write a dissertation, to write a mere article, to write a book takes years, if not, it, the shortest is months, the longest is years. I need more instant gratification, and I need something that's visually beautiful, so the cooking keeps me sane. It's sort of like, sort of like mindfulness training. I can't doom scroll if I have a sharp knife in my hands and I'm cutting up vegetables. I can't. It makes me focus on the present. And also, you've watched The Shining - all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. I would go nuts if all I had was work. I mean, look, I enjoy my work, I love my work, but I cannot just be my job. I am not just my job. I have other things that I like to do.
Kate Carpenter 27:54
I think that's a very healthy perspective. I've also been really struck that not only did you have to sort of retrain yourself to think as a historian and learn all this historical background, but becoming interdisciplinary also meant building a whole new community, really, of scholars, and that we often think about writing as sort of the solitary act that we do on our own, and and you have been a remarkable presence in sort of the historical community and becoming part of especially that legal history world. How did you do that? How did you find a new community of historians to connect with?
Anna Law 28:28
All of that was done online through social media. So, first, beginning with Twitter, many years ago, there would be zero US historians and legal historians who knew who I was if I was not on social media. I've met other historians, I've met law professors, I've met sociologists who do historical work, and it's all on social media. And I think people think of social media as a broadcast mechanism where you say things and you make connections that way, but actually it's establishing relationships, even if you never met the person, right? It's talking to people you don't usually talk to. It's not just broadcasting your own research, but sharing other people's research and asking them questions about it and engaging with other people, so when you meet them at a conference for the first time in real life, like Kevin Kruse and Adam Rothman, that I met this past weekend, and Beverly Gage, I don't, I don't know them in real life, I only talked to Adam and Kevin online, but so it's, it's an icebreaker, and it's much easier where I feel like I knew them. Of course, I don't know them, but it's, it's at least, it's like, oh yeah, I know I've spoken to you before, even if not in person.
Kate Carpenter 29:57
I'm curious that, you know, it sounds like you learned a lot from historians in the process of working on this book. What do you think historians could learn from political scientists?
Anna Law 30:07
Well, the way, the way we think of institutions as a structuring and channeling power, I think the way we focus on power and not just.. I think I feel like I learned more from historians, and I think I'm not the right person to ask what historians have learned from my book. I mean, I would love to hear it, but I don't really know. I guess I will know once the book gets reviewed, and I see.. I mean, what's scary is. well, scary for me is because it's an interdisciplinary book. It will get reviewed in history journals, not just political science journals and law journals. It will get reviewed, and I knew that from the beginning, and I knew I was going to be held to standards of history journals. I would like to say one thing that I learned from historians from reading so many monographs. I'm trained as a historical institutionalist, so I study how institutions like the federal courts or federalism evolve and develop over time. I'm not trained to study people. In my first book, it's about the Supreme Court and the US Courts of Appeals. When readers asked me, but what about the people of the cases that they decided, I would say I don't know. I only read legal opinions, I didn't read the voices or consider the voices of the immigrants whose cases were being decided, so this time, after reading so much history, I didn't want this to be a story of, oh, these poor innocent people and these terrible things being done to them. So I learned from his story, as you need to take into consideration and get across the agency of the people involved.
Kate Carpenter 31:57
Were the peer reviewers for this book? Did they come from a historical perspective, or political science?
Anna Law 32:03
All of it. Okay, so what I had two rounds of reviewers at Oxford. The first round, I could tell it was a political scientist who's an American political development expert and a US historian of the 19th century. The final round of review was a US historian of the 19th century and a law professor, who, immigration law professor, who said at the first line of the review, I teach US immigration law, I do not know the history that she's covering. This is not ideal, but that was the two readers that I had.
Kate Carpenter 32:40
Wow, interesting. Perhaps that leads well to my next question, which is that I've seen on social media that you've, you've had some thoughts to share recently on what writers maybe should and shouldn't do when it comes to picking a press to publish their book. Would you share the advice that you have for people?
Anna Law 32:58
I think that when writers are trying to find a press, they need to talk to someone who published with that press within that year, because academic publishing is in flux. There's a lot, a lot of presses are restructuring, not in a great way, from what I've experienced, and talking to somebody who published with that press three years ago is not really going to give you an accurate picture of what's going on. There are some presses that do a lot better at promoting the authors' books if that is important to them, and so just by observing and talking to other historians, I know UNC and Princeton, and from talking to my political science friend who published with Princeton, they're amazing with promoting their authors. Other presses, not so much. It, you know, there's so many considerations, but you have to talk to authors who published with those presses in that year to see what their experiences are like, talk to more than one person, and that's why it helps helpful to be on social media where you can see who published with Oxford, who published with UNC, can you ask them questions.
Kate Carpenter 34:21
You sometimes get those sort of behind the scenes glimpses.
Anna Law 34:24
Right.
Kate Carpenter 34:24
Why is it important to you to make sure you're promoting your book, not just, you know, get it out there, go for a promotion, but why? Why does it matter to you to make sure other people are seeing it?
Anna Law 34:37
I would like nothing better after a 16 year project than to drop the book and go back into the woods, really would love that, because I'm truly sick of it, which sounds strange, but I work at CUNY Brooklyn College, a underfunded public school, I'm not in the sort of fancy networks of the R1s or the Ivies, and so my book can be amazing, but who will know about it? And I have some friends who say they write scholarship for themselves to figure out an intellectual question. Okay, yes, all that, but I want someone to read it after 16 years, so if I don't promote it, I know no one will. If I don't toot my own horn, no one will. So it would be the, if you don't promote your book, it's like running a marathon, sitting down at mile 24 and say, whoo, yeah, that's close enough. Whoo, that was hard. Finish the race, promote the book.
Kate Carpenter 35:47
What is the most influential writing advice you've ever gotten?
Anna Law 35:50
I think from my friend Ben Carp, who read several substantial, very messy Revolutionary War and colonial chapters. There were many days where I would sit down to write, I had the time blocked out, and it just wasn't flowing, and it's so frustrating when that happens. And Ben reminded me, he said, you can't measure your writing progress in one day, think of what you accomplished over a two week period. There will be days where it's really flowing, and you can sit there for three, four straight hours and write, you know, what my former grad student, Brendan O'Malley, says, demon write. He's like, demon write. But those days are rare, and there will be many other days where I'm sitting at the computer, rewriting, you know, going nowhere with one paragraph. So Ben said you need to measure your progress in two week increments, not in a day. There's no point in beating yourself up for, oh my god, I had four hours of completely wasted it. I got nothing done.
Kate Carpenter 36:57
Who do you like to read as inspiration for your writing?
Anna Law 37:01
Megan Kate Nelson, an amazing narrative historian, Lucy Salyer, my favorite legal historian. I don't know how to do narrative history, I will probably never learn, but I admire people who write it and who execute it very well.
Kate Carpenter 37:24
Are you thinking about another project? Will you do more history in the future?
Anna Law 37:29
Well, for the political scientists out there, all three of them, my ambition is to go nowhere near the 20th century with my research again, so it's going to be early republic and 19th century. My third book project that I got the idea for writing from the second book is, why does everyone know Ellis Island? No one's heard of, except some California people, no one knows Angel Island off of San Francisco, and even fewer people know Gadsden's Wharf in Charleston, South Carolina, where 200 boat loads of enslaved people disembark. What about those other American gateway cities, and what does that say? I would use US immigration history again to theorize about the intersection of historiography and constitutional memory, so that is the tentative plan for the third book.
Kate Carpenter 38:31
Interesting. Have you started reading for that?
Anna Law 38:33
Started reading, and I visited Gadsden's Wharf and Angel Island in the last year to sort of see how those, how the public history, how those sites are presented to the general public.
Kate Carpenter 38:47
Well, I look forward to seeing what comes of that. Dr. Anna Law, thanks so much for joining me on Drafting the Past, and congratulations on your new book. And welcome to the world of history.
Anna Law 38:58
Thank you so much. This was so fun.
Kate Carpenter 39:01
That's our show for today. Thanks for listening, and thanks again to Dr. Anna Law for joining me on this episode. You'll find a link to her book and everything else we talked about in this episode in the show notes at draftingthepast.com. If you know a friend who would like this episode, maybe you know a political scientist who's dreaming of being a historian, please pass it on to them. Until next time, remember that friends don't let friends write boring history.
